Interesting Thanksgiving Tidbits

Posted: November 27, 2024 at 6:25 am

Some Turkey Day Fun Facts:

• Americans eat 704 million pounds of turkey every Thanksgiving. The average weight of each turkey sitting on the Thanksgiving table is 16 pounds.
• Female turkeys don’t gobble. Only male turkeys make a “gobble” sound, which is why they’re known as gobblers. Females and males cackle, purr, and yelp, depending on the situation.
• The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade had live animals – not balloons. When the parade began in 1924, live animals were paraded through the streets of New York. The animals, including elephants and tigers, came from the Central Park Zoo. The balloons didn’t arrive until 1927. Felix the Cat was the very first balloon. Today, about 28 million people watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
• It’s not the turkey that makes you tired on Thanksgiving. Yes, turkey contains tryptophan, but not in quantities high enough to make you really sleepy. So what really makes you tired? Probably all the sides – which tend to be full of fat and carbs – not to mention the alcohol.
• The Butterball hotline answers 100,000 turkey-related questions every year. The Turkey Talk Line was founded in 1981 and went from receiving 11,000 questions that first year to answering more than 100,000 questions across the U.S. and Canada every holiday season.
• TV dinners were actually inspired by Thanksgiving leftovers. Seems back in 1953, due to an ordering error, food company Swanson was stuck with 260 tons of frozen turkeys. Instead of tossing all that turkey and taking a loss, Swanson salesman Gerry Thomas came up with a genius idea. Inspired by the meals served on planes, he ordered 5,000 aluminum trays and organized an assembly line of workers to fill them with turkey, peas, cornbread, and sweet potatoes. That’s how the TV dinner was born.
• FDR once moved Thanksgiving up by a week. In the middle of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up one week to allow more time for shopping before Christmas. Otherwise, it would have fallen on November 30th.
• In 1705, the town of Colchester, Connecticut, postponed Thanksgiving for a week because they couldn’t make pumpkin pies. Apparently, the river had frozen over, leaving them unable to get molasses from neighboring towns.
• Speaking of pumpkin pies … If you want to start a romantic spark this holiday season, you should start baking some pumpkin pies. A study found that the smell of pumpkin pie is a turn-on for men.